Latin American Plea for Incorporation of Other, Non-English Languages in TDWG Standards Documentation

PLOS, ANABELA; ESCOBAR, DAIRO; NÚÑEZ, FABIOLA; ACOSTA, NÉSTOR; GRATTAROLA, FLORENCIA; QUINTERO, ESTHER; ZERMOGLIO, PAULA; AMAYA, LEISY; MANCINA, CARLOS; VARGAS, MANUEL

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards

Pensoft

Año: 2020 vol. 4

Historically, some of the most successful biodiversity data sharing initiatives have beendeveloped particularly in North America, Europe, and Australia. In parallel, and driven bynecessity, tools, practices and standards were shared across othes communities. In thelast decade, great efforts have been made by countries in other regions to join thebiodiversity data network and share their data worldwide. Although knowledge, tools, anddocumentation are broadly distributed, language is the main constraint for their use, asmost of it is only available in English. English may be the first most spoken languageworldwide (Eberhard et al. 2020), but it is not native to most of the population, including asizable proportion of the United States (Ryan 2013). For instance, Spanish is listed as the second most spoken native language worldwide, after Mandarin Chinese (Eberhard et al.2020). While recognizing that English is currently considered the ?universal language? forscientifically-related activities, it has been pointed out that a large proportion of biodiversityscientific knowledge is not produced in English, and that language constitutes a barrier tosharing knowledge (Amano et al. 2016). Actions to overcome this have been called for, forexample by the 2nd Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC2) in its list ofambitions for supporting international collaboration (Hobern et al. 2019), but are still largelymissing in the broad community.Language affects the understanding and use of biodiversity data standards and relateddocumentation for all the community, both English and non-English speakers. Our findingsin the Latin American region suggest that the availability of materials in other languages,namely Spanish and Portuguese, would greatly benefit the region and improve ourinvolvement in biodiversity data sharing. Also, on the other hand, the English speakingcommunity would benefit from better understanding knowledge in other non-Englishlanguages, allowing broader use of data from all regions. This work also constitutes a pleafrom the Latin American and the Spanish-speaking community at large to the BiodiversityInformation Standards (TDWG) to explore and incorporate other languages, hencefostering understanding, and therefore widening the use of TDWG standards in our region.We provide a list of people supporting the petition as Supplementary Material (Suppl.material 1). In the petition we also identify people (more than 60% of the signatories) whoare willing to contribute to translating TDWG resources into Spanish. There is no single,best mechanism to move this initiative forward, but the approaches of some otherinitiatives (e.g., the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) translators network) arebeing explored, weighing resources needed both from the volunteers and the managementperspectives. We will present the different options for the community to evaluate anddecide upon a suitable action plan.